KARE 11 is broadcasting its “Sunrise” morning news from a sister station in Atlanta Wednesday morning with other staffers stationed at its tower in Shoreview.
“This will be our home base” for the next few days, said anchor Alicia Lewis as she spoke to viewers while standing under the station’s 1,400-foot-tall tower.
News staff and employees were chased out of the station’s Golden Valley studio about 1:30 p.m. Tuesday when the lights went out and an apparent transformer started popping, sparking and exploding, sending smoke into the facility off Hwy. 55 and Boone Avenue.
“Everybody ran out of the building,” said host Jason Hackett Wednesday morning. “A big mess was left behind.”
Anchor Jana Shortal posted video of the incident on social media.
“Just lots of pops, lots of pops,” Shortal said.
Nobody was hurt in the incident, but it made the KARE 11 team get creative to put together an outdoor broadcast at 6 p.m., skipping their 5 p.m. newscast, from their site in Shoreview. The station also broadcast its 10 p.m. news from there.
Anchors Lauren Leamanczyk and meteorologist John Ziegler flew to Atlanta and were behind the cameras at WXIZ, an NBC-affiliated television station in Atlanta, Georgia, owned by Tegna Inc., the same company that owns KARE-TV.
